shorthand for feeding contents of multiple files to the stdin of a script

Question

Hi good people of this community,

Say I have a script called script, that reads from stdin and spits out some results to the screen.

If I wanted to feed it contents of one file, I would have typed:

$ ./script < file1.txt

But what if I want to feed the contents of the multiple files to the script the same way, is it at all possible? The best I came up with so far was:

cat file1.txt file2.txt > combined.txt && ./script < combined.txt

Which uses two commands and creates a temp file. Is there a way to do the same thing but bypassing creating the combined file?

Answer 1

You can use cat and a pipe:

cat file1 file2 file3 ... fileN | ./script

Your example, using a pipe, and no temp file:

join file1.txt file2.txt | ./script